Tuning Drums: The Easy Way

On: September 18, 2024

Believe it or not, although I have played quite a few over the years, I just got my first acoustic drum kit very recently (eDrums have been easier to handle at home!). Setting this first acoustic kit was fun and easy, but when getting into tuning it it was another story…

You can find pretty much any kind of method to tune your drums on the internet, with various tools and more or less useful tricks. But in the end, every drummer out there tells you that there is no rule and it’s up to you to decide how to tune your drums, so do whatever you want… Ok, sure. But not very helpful to get started!

I have tried a couple of these methods and was not happy with the result – the kit was way to ringy to my ears. That was until I stumbled upon Rob Brown’s channel and his clear explanation on how he tunes drums.

The Method

What I like about the method that he proposes is that it’s very simple and basically tunes the drums to their natural pitch. And it’s very fast. And you don’t need any other tool than the tuning key.

Here is a quick summary – you can watch Rob’s three videos below for details:

For all drums start with top and bottom heads tightened with fingers only (to get a starting point).
for each head, push with one hand in the middle of the head.
toms: tighten each lug individually until the wrinkles disappear. And you are done.
bass drum: for the batter head, tighten until wrinkles disappear, then go back with a quarter turn. For the resonant head: tighten until wrinkles disappears, then add an extra quarter turn.
snare: bottom head cranked up nice and tight. Top: tune it anywhere you like it, it should sound ok.

For the floor tom, I actually had to tighten the resonant head a bit more (like for the bass drum), as it had too much sustain to my liking.

Quick & Dirty Test

Here is how my drum kit sounds after a first tuning pass (recorded with a phone, whoops 🙁 ).

I might want to muffle the kick drum a little bit (it is impressive how deep this 22 inches shell sounds with proper tuning!) and adjust the snare, but I think that’s not bad for a start, and it took only a few minutes, as opposed to other methods I cannot even remember!